KARACHI, July 27: In the absence of signing authority Model Customs Collectorate (MCC) is unable to issue cheques of big amounts for payment of duty drawback and rebate thereby causing liquidity problem for exporters.

A large number of rebate cases pending since December 2005 are not being cleared because of lack of signing authority with the collector to issue cheques.

Under the rules and procedures for making payments there are two officials - one belonging to customs (chief accounting officer) and the other appointed by the Auditor General, who have to put their signatures on each cheque.

However, in case of MCC the Auditor General has not appointed any official to sign the cheques resulting in long delays in clearance of amounts due to exporters.

Contrary to this the other collectorates (Preventive and Export) have separate officials, who are authorised to sign and issue cheques. But in the case of MCC there is only chief accounting officer (customs).

Consequently, the payments being made by the MCC towards duty drawback and rebate are only made after seeking assistance from officials appointed by the auditor general in other collectorates.

However, this takes a lot of time as most of the officials are over burdened and give preference to work of their own collectorates. As a result exporters are facing hardship in getting their duty drawback and rebates due since long time.

Former chairman Pakistan Leather Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (Plgmea) Fawad Ijaz Khan told Dawn that during a recent meeting with Collector MCC Mohammad Nisar it was decided that all the pending cheques for duty drawback would be cleared by August 6, 2007.

Mr Khan has appealed to the Federal Revenue Board (FRB) to get appointment of a permanent signing official from the Auditor General of Pakistan and resolve the issue once for all.

However, he complained that since the filing of export documents in MCC is made electronically the computer keeps issuing cheques without any signature.

He further said that as the MCC was being run on a risk management system’ and computers have built-in system of valuation there is absolutely no chance of lower valuation of goods for exports.

Though it is mandatory on exporters to make shipments through MCC for their full container loads (FCL), but in order to avoid this system most exporters divert their export containers to the export collectorate.

Similarly, he said exporters in order to get quick payments of duty drawback and rebate declare their FCL into LCL (loose container load) by making two bills of lading and manage to ship their goods through export collectorate.